Nightshift security guard accused of stealing company electricity to charge his laptop, so he brings a typewriter to write his novel instead: 'It was never about the electricity'

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  • Security guard watching the camera footage from his desk.
  • Accused of stealing/embezzling electricity from employer

    I worked security, night shift, so I could work on my novel drafts. At work I wrote on an iPad with bluetooth keyboard and I had connected their chargers to the electric outlets in my security reception desk.
  • For some reason, a manager had a problem with me writing novels while on my night shift. They called me to HQ for a meeting and there I was accused of stealing. Stealing electricity for my laptop.
  • I told them that if they wanted to accuse me, they had to do it properly. I hadn't committed theft. I had committed embezzlement,
  • since the electricity was part of my reception area and under my supervision. Therefore, embezzlement is a vastly more insidious crime
  • and they should send me home and gather the disciplinary committee to judge whether I should be fired for this crime and I would confer with my union rep.
  • Nightshift security guard getting bored at his desk.
  • They immediately retracted their accusation and stopped bothering me with their nonsense.
  • Everyone charged their devices from company outlets, so their accusation would go for every employee to be arrested for electricity embezzlement.
  • Then they hung up a sign in the security area that nobody was allowed to charge their personal devices.
  • So I took a typewriter to work, so I didn't need to charge my writing implements.
  • Also, I had a Nokia that would hold a charge for several days, but my coworkers had smartphones that needed juice, so they
  • got angry at management for signs about not being allowed to charge their phones and that complaint spread to other locations,
  • forcing the management to remove the signs and allow people to charge their phones again, and I could hook up my iPad+BT keyboard again.
  • The 'stealing electricity' was just a rage-bait excuse to provoke me to get into an emotional outburst to my manager, so he could fire me for insubordination.
  • Instead, my response made him escalate to posting signs about the petty electricity rule that angered my coworkers with management.
  • Commenting on the cost of electricity miss the point - it was never about the theft of electricity. The accusation was intentionally ridiculous to provoke a quarrel.
  • Also, in the Netherlands the novel that I write is my intellectual property and there is no legal clause in our contracts that the company should get financially compensated for part of the novel been writing 'in company time'.
  • Night security guards taking a break away from the desk.
  • jamesholden I had a boss say something in a morning meeting about leaving lights on in mechanical rooms. we are talking 40w of lights at most across a dozen rooms.
  • I say "give me a day to properly program all the water pump drives around property and I'll Isave you 10x the power the lights cost"
  • just the 7 small pool pumps used -2800w when running, half of them ran 24/7. they could be programmed to ramp up and down and none of them needed to run at 100%.
  • Randi_Scandi Someone was once charging an electric bike at work and one of our typical busy bodies asked the CEO at a site if that could really be ok or if people should've charged for it. I've never seen the CEO looked so fed up so quickly. He just said something to the effect of "I'm not even answering that".
  • Also, if you could be charged for charging your personal phone or bike battery or whatever at work, should I also send my workplace an electricity bill for charging my work computer and work phone when working at home?
  • jeepfail . Awful lot of corporate bootlickers here that don't realize a majority of the security people out there are doing whatever they can to pass the time.

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